Many professionals today are required and/or encouraged to receive continuing education in their particular field or discipline. Conventionally, this has been accomplished through the use of professional seminars and/or home study materials. Some professions, such as the medical profession, require their members to receive a certain number of hours of continuing education over a certain time period, such as every year, or every two years. Professions which have mandatory continuing education for their members, also have compliance entities to certify that members complete the education requirement. The verification procedures followed by these compliance entities vary with the category of continuing education required. For some categories of continuing education, the verification procedure may simply entail showing proof of attendance at a seminar. Other categories of continuing education require a seminar attendee or material reviewer to complete a quiz to be graded by a certifying authority. The quiz serves as an indication that the professional has “materially participated” in the continuing education process.
The growth of the Internet has led to new methods of providing educational content to people. “Distance learning” or “remote education” are terms used to describe the provision of education over the Internet. Conventionally, distance learning providers receive certification from professional organizations, which allows them to provide continuing professional education, by maintaining a testing requirement for those types of education that require a professional to materially participate in the educational process. Unfortunately, the current testing component required by conventional continuing education providers is inefficient and unwieldy. A method is needed whereby compliance entities may be satisfied that professionals have materially participated in the continuing education process and yet does not require the professionals to undergo testing in order to prove that participation.
Moreover, professionals are often the target of on-line advertisers. The advertisers see the professionals as being more likely to have discretionary income with which to buy products. Accordingly, the advertisers place advertisements on web pages where the ads will be seen by the professionals. Unfortunately, advertisements become repetitive after being viewed multiple times and are therefore ignored. Ideally, advertisers seek to keep advertising content fresh for each user visit to a web site. Traditionally, the ability to distinguish between users visiting a web page has required resorting to privacy-intrusive methods such as cookies or user profiles. Cookies and user profiles are often disliked by web site users and their use may diminish the amount of traffic at a web site.